Note: This post was originally published on iamianwright.com it's been moved here for archival purposes.

I saw a lady on the gadget show playing games on a MacBook Pro with a 360 controller and as I already have two wireless controllers for my 360 I thought it was worth investigating. A little bit of research online told me that you need a Microsoft dongle to make the wireless controllers work with a computer or I could buy a wired controller for less than the cost of the dongle.

I bought a wired controller this morning and I have spent all afternoon fiddling about but it doesn't seem to work with Steam.

I installed the driver from here: http://tattiebogle.net/

The preference pane installed perfectly and all the buttons of my controller were recognised including the force feedback rumbles. This was encouraging.

So I tried GTA Vice City which I had purchased from the Mac App Store. The camera just span around and around. I pulled out the controller plugged it in again and it worked briefly before the camera started spiralling again. I pulled it out and tried again.  This time it worked a little longer but immediately started spinning while I was in a shoot out with the cops. Not ideal.

Next I tried Half-Life 2 purchased on Steam.  At first the controller did nothing so I tried Gamepad Companion which made my character intermittently walk into walls and then refuse to respond anymore.

I looked on Steam's Support pages and found this article on using and xbox 360 controller with source games. They mention using the configuration files with Half-Life 2 so I tried that. Still no joy.

I have now read so many articles and watched about ten videos where teenagers tell me how easy it is to get the 360 controller working on the mac but I still can't figure it out. Perhaps it's the fact that I'm trying it with old games?

I purchased Borderlands from the Mac App Store but I can't download 9.51Gb on my 0.2Mbps connection so I'll download it at work in the morning and try again tomorrow night. Hopefully that will work otherwise the controllers going back and I'm giving up on portable gaming.